Relax wrote:Next will address your post in reverse I think is best way
2nd, one must remember that tonnage as a cost consideration is useless as an indicator. Today, the hull cost of a ship is pennies on the dollar compared to systems cost, personnel cost, maintenance cost. This will only become MORE true in the future. As RFC has stated: Pearls of Weber: Warship construction costs (thefifthimperium.com)
“And, frankly, armor in the Honorverse is about as dirt cheap as any building component comes. Now, the primary weapons cost for a podnought is to be found in its missiles, not its shipboard weapon mounts, but we're talking construction here.”
So, if true for a podnaught, then should be true of a BC as well. The systems = $$$, not the ship itself.
I wasn't thinking of the cost of armour and building materials themselves as the driving factor. I was using the ship tonnage and its total volume as a proxy and first order approximation for everything else. A ship that is 4x larger than another probably carries 4x as many crew, which means it needs 4x as much consumables for their survival, 4x as many spare parts for its internal components, with 4x as many missiles aboard.
Theemile is completely right that some components will not scale linearly like this. You don't need 4x as many fusion reactors, and you won't need 4x as many main computer cores or ECCM suite. But for a first order approximation, without knowing the full cost breakdown, it's a reasonable meter-stick, especially since the long-term operational costs are probably going to outweigh the cost of building the dry hull.
Or maybe the cost doesn't scale linearly, but inverse-quadratically. That is, a ship 4x bigger costs "only" 2x more. Either way, a BC(L) costs way less than an SD(P).
So, build time BC(L) 14/18 or ~80% the hull cost of an SD'P minus the missiles
That's a MAJOR difference that you can't ignore. The missiles cost a lot. I've been pondering just how much the 2 million missiles that Honor fired at Galton cost overall.
Now, in peace time, you're not supposed to fire those missiles. So their absolute cost is diluted over time, so they're not going to contribute as much to the total cost of operation of the ship as they would at war time. That's not the case for the cost of people, consumables, and spare parts. Please let's not hear again about hexes and quads!
Essentially, the BC(L) is envisioned by the Royal Manticoran Navy as the minimum platform capable of performing the traditional battlecruiser roles of long-range, extended patrol; long-range interdiction; construction of commerce raiders (not necessarily the same thing as convoy protection); flag showing and rear area security missions; screening heavier ships and critical convoys; and force projection against anything "below the wall," in an era of multidrive missiles. By pre-First Havenite War standards, they are huge, expensive units; compared to a current Manticoran SD(P), they are an austere, extremely economical means for projecting the required capabilities,"
Key phrase: Projecting required capabilities--> in a very large navy . Effectively this is a Battleship class, not BC. So if one wishes to argue the BC class already disappeared, I am open to the debate.
I wish you to reread what you posted and highlighted, especially that semi-colon. RFC's argument was making a comparison: a) in pre-First Havenite War standards, the BC(L)s would be expensive units (semi-colon) but b) today, they are austere, extremely economical compared to an SD(P). So he
said that the BC(L)s aren't that expensive, for projecting the required capabilities. I'll concede he didn't compare the BC(L) to a CA(L), but to the SD(P)s. So if those SD(P)s are much more expensive than pre-war SDs, then the BC(L) will look cheap by comparison. And while that is likely the case, the CA(L)s are also likely more expensive than the pre-war Star Knight CAs, and the overall cost for everything has likely gone down anyway due to economies of scale.
He also said that the RMN designed the Nike to be the "minimum platform capable of performing the traditional battlecruiser roles." One caveat with that is that this is what the RMN designed or attempted to design, not the omniscient narrator saying that it
is so, so we have to allow for a flawed design. You can also disagree on whether there's any need for the "traditional battlecruiser roles" in the first place. I'd trust the RMN more than you that there is such a need and this is the smallest ship that, in the era of MDMs and pod launches, that can do all those roles without too big a compromise in any of them. Smaller units can perform in some of those roles, like destroyers and light cruisers being used for commerce protection where nothing bigger than a frigate or an older destroyer is likely to ever show up. But they can't do all of the roles.
Anyways, between a couple of the links above, what BuWeaps has actually said is that THEY, like I, see that there are too many classes of ships in the modern MDM/DDM age. BuWeaps sees the Destroyer disappearing AND the SAG-C disappearing keeping the modern CL, BC(L), CLAC, SD'P. Naturally I argued for keeping a modernized CA instead of the BC(L) as I see the BC's role completely negated by MDM's as the only use of the BCL is beating up on neobarbs who do not have MDM pods... and those folks are going to be just as impressed by a CA.
The RMN tends to think about ship types more than ship classes or ship sizes. That's why the Nike is the "smallest battlecruiser" at 2.5 million tonnes and the destroyers have crept up to and leapfrogged the size of light cruisers. So the question is not what ships can perform which roles, but which roles need performing in the first place?
BuWeaps argument seems to be that there is no need for a ship type that fills the role that a CA traditionally does. I don't know what their argument is -- actually, I don't know what the role of a CA is in the first place. Given the RFC quoted text and what you're saying BuWeaps is saying, I could infer that the RMN needs a ship type that can perform some of the battlecruiser roles but not all, and that can be sufficiently achieved with just light cruisers.
I can't completely agree. By definition, the CL can't do all that a BC can do, so that would leave some roles unfulfilled by anything below the BC. So why not have another ship type that complements the CL for some of those other roles?
As for Keyhole you brought up: 1st iteration was 20,000t. Yet, why bother? We have Athena FTL capable ~RD which can send full video + data when a CM only needs 2 dimensional coordinates. The difference in data rate here is literally A million to 1 on the VERY low end. It is beyond absurd one could not use same platform to broadcast information to CM's.
The limitation of the Hermes was identified as one of the important reasons why Honor could not have attacked Tourville at a distance during Beatrice.
Bandwidth isn't everything. The Hermes is a civilian product, built to civilian specifications. So it's possible -- very likely even -- that there are other things it traded off that a military unit would have needed, like for example latency, or its own stealth. If it can be picked off easily in a battlefield, it's not going to help much in controlling missiles.
That said, I do expect that reducing the size of the Keyholes will be a priority, so smaller ships can carry them and/or they take less hull space in the ships that already do. Or more redundancy for SDs. Smaller units may also forego the defensive aspects of Keyhole and focus on FTL control of missiles, but if so, we have to remember that the units that can carry the full defensive Keyhole are that much tougher to get through to.
